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Kevin McCoy, centre, a right-handed reliever with the Clinton LumberKings, was signed as a college senior for $5,000 in 2013. He will make about $6,500 this season. (Brendan Kennedy / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

A sour, stale-beer stink emanates from the Archer Daniels Midland corn-processing plant in Clinton, Iowa, the biggest employer in the town that's home to the LumberKings minor-league team. (Brendan Kennedy / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Matt Daly, who spent five seasons in the Blue Jays minor-league system, is one of 32 former minor-league players suing Major League Baseball for failing to pay minimum wage and overtime over the course of their career.

Garrett Broshius is the lawyer representing 32 former minor-league baseball players suing Major League Baseball. He spent six seasons in minor-league baseball in the San Francisco Giants' farm system.

CLINTON, IOWA—Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams is just an hour and a half northwest of here. That old corn field from which he carved a supernatural baseball diamond is a little ways up the Mississippi, near Dyersville, Iowa, where it stands today as a tourist attraction, preserved to look just like it did in the movie.

Down here in Clinton, a shrinking factory town that’s home to the minor-league LumberKings, sits a field for a more earthly dream, though equally romantic.

“It’s an amazing feeling to be one step closer to my ultimate goal in life,” says Eddie Campbell, an earnest, 22-year-old starting pitcher for the LumberKings. “And that’s to play Major League Baseball.”

The minor leagues are often glorified as a simpler, less corrupt version of America’s national pastime, where the game is unadulterated by fame or money and where long bus rides build character. But behind the pastoral charm is a less idealized reality: that it operates on the backs of workers earning poverty wages.

The LumberKings, named for the millionaire timber barons who once ran this town, are the Class-A affiliate of the Seattle Mariners, who, like every other major-league team, pay their A-level minor leaguers roughly $6,300 for the five-month season — about two-thirds what Jose Bautista makes per inning.

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Players in the NBA’s affiliated minor leagues make three to five times as much, while the NHL’s unionized minor leaguers can earn even more, with greater benefits to boot. (The NFL doesn’t have an affiliated minor league.)

Minor-league baseball players regularly work 60- to 70-hour weeks with only two or three days off a month, but they get no overtime pay. They receive only a $25 meal per diem — no salary — for the mandatory four to six weeks of spring training. Same goes for any instructional leagues they may be required to attend when their 140-game schedule ends.

Players are required to pay $5 per day in clubhouse dues for each home game

A handful of players receive six-figure signing bonuses in their first year, but many sign for $5,000 or less. So most players earn less than the federal U.S. poverty line, which in 2014 is an annual income of $11,670 for a single-person household.

How does a $9-billion industry like Major League Baseball get away with this?

It has a steady supply of willing, non-unionized workers who are required to sign standardized, seven-year contracts binding them to a single organization. The players have little or no leverage to change what baseball considers a rite of passage. Besides, they’re chasing a childhood dream.

“I’m lucky to be able to be here and get paid to play the game I love,” Campbell says.

But critics accuse Major League Baseball of exploiting that dream while reaping the benefits of the minor leaguers’ cheap labour, and a lawsuit filed by 32 former minor-league players threatens to upend the current system.

“The Defendants have preyed upon minor leaguers, who are powerless to combat the collusive power of the MLB cartel,” reads a passage from the lawsuit, filed in February, which the plaintiffs hope will soon be certified as a class action.

“Baseball has just ignored this for so long that it has reached a tipping point,” says Garrett Broshuis, the St. Louis, Mo.-based lawyer behind the suit and a former minor-league player himself who spent six seasons in the San Francisco Giants’ farm system.

Since 1976, when major-league players won the right to free agency, their salaries have increased by 2,000 per cent. The major-league minimum is now $500,000.

But minor-league salaries have increased by only 75 per cent over the same period while inflation has risen more than 400 per cent. In real dollars, Broshuis says, minor leaguers earn less today than they did more than 30 years ago.

Kevin McCoy, centre, a right-handed reliever with the Clinton LumberKings, was signed as a college senior for $5,000 in 2013. He will make about $6,500 this season. (Brendan Kennedy/Toronto Star)

Though couched in legalese, the crux of the former players’ case is fairly simple: they argue they weren’t paid minimum wage, were not compensated for overtime and in some cases worked without pay entirely. They will be seeking back pay, though they haven’t yet set a specific amount for damages.

Major League Baseball maintains a longstanding exemption from antitrust laws, so its franchises can collectively agree on standardized minor-league contracts. But Broshuis argues the league is not exempt from federal wage and hour laws.

Stanford University law professor Bill Gould agrees. “It’s quite clear that the league is working beyond the rules established by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in terms of hours the players have committed and the pay they receive,” says Gould, who previously worked as a salary arbitrator for Major League Baseball. “The facts are very clear. They’re going to have to find some kind of exception.”

Major League Baseball refused to comment for this story, but in its “answer” — an initial legal response, filed in May —it put forward several potential defences, including the notion that minor-league players are seasonal workers and exempt from hourly wage laws. Gould says the seasonal exemption is baseball’s “only way out.

“If that doesn’t catch on, it seems to me that it’s a question of what kind of settlements they’re going to engage in.”

The minor-league lawsuit is the latest in a growing movement of semi-pro and student athletes fighting for fairer pay: the unionization push for Canadian junior hockey players, for instance, or NCAA athletes’ fight to organize and be compensated for the use of their names and likenesses in merchandising. The difference is that minor leaguers are unambiguously full-time professionals and represent the bulk of the league’s employees. Major League Baseball employs eight minor leaguers for every major leaguer.

“It’s a situation that is ripe for the owners to take advantage of those minor-league guys because they are chasing a dream and they want to get into the industry so badly that they’re willing to do almost anything to do it,” says Broshuis.

Luke Guarnaccia, catcher for the Seattle Mariners' minor-league affiliate in Clinton, Iowa, lives in a two-bedroom apartment with four other teammates. (Brendan Kennedy/Toronto Star)

Matt Daly is one of the former minor leaguers who joined the lawsuit earlier this year. He played five seasons in the Blue Jays’ farm system from 2008 to 2012 — earning less than $40,000 over his entire minor-league career — and remembers how quickly he became disillusioned with the life. “Everything seems glamorous and amazing when you’re a professional athlete. Then I got there and saw how different it was.”

Daly worked off-season jobs and lived in cramped apartments to make ends meet. After the birth of his first child in 2010, his in-laws paid the rent at the Dunedin, Fla., apartment he shared with his wife. “We wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise.”

Daly was released by the Jays in 2013 after he participated in spring training without pay. Now 28 and working for a home builder in Colorado, he says he understands people who think he should feel lucky to have been paid to play baseball. But he hopes those people also consider that the league is a multi-billion-dollar corporation, and when you compute the hours he worked with the pay he received, it doesn’t add up.

“I know every ball player that’s ever played this game is grateful for that opportunity . . . (But) realistically, you would be better off with a 20-hour work week at a minimum-wage job for a full year, from a financial standpoint. That’s something I hope people can respect and understand.”

LIVING THE DREAM

The first thing you notice in Clinton is the smell. Or smells. The strongest — a sour, stale-beer stink — comes from the Archer Daniels Midland corn-processing plant, a sprawling complex that dominates the town’s southern waterfront.

The company is Clinton’s biggest employer and looms large, not only in its physical presence but also in the town’s psyche. The plant’s workers have not been organized since 1979, when the previous owner, Clinton Corn, busted the local union after a nearly year-long strike. Clinton’s population has dwindled ever since, from a high of nearly 35,000 in 1970 to today’s 26,473.

The aroma of dog food competes, wafting over from the Purina plant. On a hot day with a little wind it makes for a putrid potpourri.

“This isn’t an ideal place to live for the summer,” admits LumberKings’ centre fielder Aaron Barbosa. “But at the same time we don’t make that much money and it’s cheaper to live in a worse place.”

Most players live four or five guys — sometimes six — to a one- or two-bedroom apartment in the cheapest building in town, splitting the rent to stretch their $625 biweekly paycheques. “Fit as many people in as you can in to save money,” Barbosa says.

Typically, the veterans get a bedroom while the others sleep on air mattresses in the common room or on the couch. “It’s only a place to crash,” shrugs catcher Luke Guarnaccia, 22, who shares a two-bedroom apartment with four other players.

The athletes are at the ballpark for about 10 hours every day, not including travel time or double-headers — the LumberKings have played 11 this season. For a 6:30 p.m. game, they will arrive around 1 or 2 and take advantage of the free peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the clubhouse before mandatory stretching, batting practice and drills. They may come earlier to work out in the gym with the team’s trainer.

“I knew it was going to be a lot of work,” says Blake Holovach, a 23-year-old left-hander from Kansas City. “But I didn’t know we were going to be at the field all day.”

Baseball’s grind of a schedule and repetitive practice regime necessitate long days at the ballpark. “But if you’re working at a job that requires you to put in that many hours,” Broshuis says, “out of basic fairness it just makes sense that you should be compensated for those hours that you put in.

“If you’re working at McDonald’s and you end up working 60 hours a week for whatever reason, they have to pay you for all 60 of those hours and for 20 of those hours they have to pay you overtime. If McDonald’s can figure out a way to comply with those laws, then why can’t Major League Baseball figure it out?”

RITE OF PASSAGE

I arrive at the ballpark at 9:30 a.m. to join the LumberKings before a three-game road trip to Kane County, Ill. The team is in the middle of a stretch of 20 games without a day off to end the season, and their playoff hopes are dim.

This bus trip is an easy one, though — only two hours. Just long enough to watch a Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson buddy flick, and nothing like the eight-hour treks to Bowling Green, Ky., or Dayton, Ohio.

The LumberKings’ manager, Scott Steinmann, played three minor-league seasons before becoming a coach in 2003. He says the conditions for players are cushy compared to what he went through, recalling when he played in the Southern League and melted through eight-hour commutes on old buses with no air conditioning. Everybody would strip to their underwear and the bus would reek from 30 sweating men.

“This minor league, it’s kind of like a rite of passage,” he says. “You go through it, you’ve endured it, you’ve transcended up to the level of a major-league player. But all those guys up there have gone and played on fields like this and played in small towns like Clinton, and you always have those stories and those things to draw upon to say, ‘I’ve gone through a bit of struggle but I’m better because of it.’ ”

The LumberKings lose all three games to the first-place Kane County Cougars — the eventual champions of the Midwest League — and drive back to Clinton late Saturday night, arriving around 1 a.m. Sunday. The players have to be back at the ballpark in about nine hours for a Sunday afternoon home game.

Barbosa, the LumberKings’ lead-off hitter, collects six hits on the three-game trip, boosting his season-long batting average to .310. The 22-year-old from outside Boston is enjoying a breakout season and could get promoted to advanced Class-A next season. He plans to finish his civil engineering degree from Northeastern University this off-season, and says it’s “flat-out stupid” not to have a backup plan beyond baseball.

Barbosa won’t openly complain about his low pay, though he eventually admits it “doesn’t seem fair. “But it makes sense in a way, just because of how many of us there are.”

Baseball’s minor-league system is vast and deep. Most major-league teams are affiliated with eight minor-league teams, ranging from the short-season Dominican and Gulf Coast rookie leagues to Triple-A, which is one step below the majors.

Some minor-league teams are owned by the parent clubs, but most operate independently, linked to their major-league affiliate by player-development contracts. The major-league team pays the players and coaching staff and oversees all player development, while the minor-league team runs daily operations, such as tickets sales and concessions.

The LumberKings — who are in low Class-A, the lowest level of full-season professional baseball and four steps below the big leagues — are one of the few community-owned franchises left in minor-league baseball, and they have operated that way since 1937. They are a for-profit corporation, but general manager Ted Tornow says they have never paid dividends to their 1,000-odd shareholders. “Any profits have gone back into the team or the facilities,” he declares.

Monthly minor-league salaries range from $1,100 in rookie leagues to $2,150 at the Triple-A level. All players receive one-time signing bonuses, which range dramatically, from more than $1 million for a first-round pick to as little as $1,000 for a late-round college senior.

The LumberKings’ lone Canadian, Tyler O’Neill, signed for $650,000 last year. O’Neill — who grew up in Maple Ridge, B.C. — will be financially secure even if he has to stretch the bonus for five or six minor-league seasons. Some of his teammates, however, signed for a fraction of what he did. Kevin McCoy, a college senior, signed for $5,000.

Tyler O'Neill, left, shown with Aaron Barbosa, grew up in Maple Ridge, B.C., and is the only Canadian on the LumberKings. (Brendan Kennedy/Toronto Star)

So while technically every player receives the same in-season salary, the organization invests far more resources in highly touted prospects who are being groomed for the majors. But even the highest-ranked prospects typically spend years in the minors, and they need players to play with and against. That’s why teams need cheaper signs like McCoy to fill out the rosters.

McCoy, though, doesn’t see it that way. Like Campbell, he’s just happy for the opportunity.

“I feel very fortunate to be paid to play baseball, something I’ve been doing my whole life,” he says. “The Mariners are an incredible organization.”

The 23-year-old relief pitcher is a trivia buff and fitness nut who believes in the power of positive thinking. “(The low pay) doesn’t bother me because I have the mindset that you can’t put a finite, monetary amount on a dream, on an ambition, on an aspiration. It’s something that transcends yourself. You’re playing for every single kid that one day dreams of being in your shoes.”

There is a dissonance that occurs in every conversation with a minor-league player. When they talk about their commitment to the team and what’s expected of them, they use the language of employment: This is a business. I gotta do my job. This is what we get paid to do. But when the topic of their actual salaries comes up, they fall back on a different kind of cliché: You can’t put a price on a dream. We play a kid’s game. I’m doing what I love.

“It’s a system or a culture (the league) has created where it’s a business when they need it to be a business and a game when they need it to be a game,” says Lucas Mann, an Iowa-based writer who spent a full season with the LumberKings in 2010, chronicling the year in his book Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere.

The players also embrace an image of themselves as heroic underdogs, Mann says. “Even the word dream, right? These general terms do a really good job of whitewashing everything else.”

Roughly 10 per cent of the 6,000 active minor-league players will get a sniff of the big leagues. So only two, maybe three, of the 25 players currently on the LumberKings’ roster will get a chance to earn major-league money.

But LumberKings manager Steinmann waves away the long odds. “If you’ve got a uniform, you’ve got a chance,” he says.

He’s not wrong. Mark Buehrle, the Blue Jays’ veteran left-hander, was a 38th-round draft pick. He has earned $119 million over his 15-year career and will make $19 million next year. Mike Piazza, a 12-time all-star, was selected in the 62nd round — after most teams had stopped drafting — as a favour to his father. He became a superstar and earned more than $120 million in his career.

Stories like these are a powerful incentive.

“The only thing that keeps you going is the hope of making all that money, and hopefully it’s in a couple to a few years, so you don’t have to worry about the little money that we make now,” says Holovach, who was drafted in the 27th round in 2012. “It’ll all hopefully pay itself off.”

Until then, some players will get financial help from their parents while others try to save as much as they can in their off-season jobs, which range from giving baseball clinics to pumping gas to selling shoes.

To a man, the players say they wouldn’t trade their experience. They relish the competition and the camaraderie. The time between the lines, under the lights, is intoxicating.

“I have a lot of bills to pay and an apartment back home with my fiancée that I still pay for, and I barely get by,” says reliever Aaron Brooks, who sends her $200 from every paycheque. “But it’s way better than going home and working in McDonald’s or something. They may be making more money, but they’re not enjoying it.”

Aaron Brooks, a right-handed reliever for the Clinton LumberKings Class-A minor-league team, works at a shoe store in the offseason. (Brendan Kennedy/Toronto Star)

For others, the game is like an extended adolescence.

“I still feel like a kid so when I get these cheques I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s kind of a lot of money,’ even though it’s not,” says Campbell.

Blue Jays pitcher R.A. Dickey, 39, spent 14 seasons in the minors (though the bulk was at the Triple-A level) and says he enjoyed the experience despite the low pay.

“Of course you’d like it to be more, but you also understand that you’re working towards something much like in any industry you start in the mail room to work your way up to being a CEO . . . Nobody’s holding a gun to your head saying you gotta be a minor-league baseball player. You do it because you love it and you dreamed about doing it.”

Dickey, who made $850 in his first minor-league season, worked a multitude of off-season jobs, from menial warehouse work to landscaping to working at a bookstore.

While he enjoyed his experience in general, Dickey says, he wishes there had been some type of union protection for when the Texas Rangers pulled back their initial signing-bonus offer of $800,000 and reduced it to $75,000 when team doctors found he did not have an ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow.

“Outside of that I kind of just accepted my surroundings. As a 21-year-old kid, whatever they were, they were. I didn’t really know the difference. When you don’t have something to compare it to, it’s hard to know if it’s unsuitable working conditions or not.”

FEAR OF BEING BLACKBALLED

The minor-league lawsuit won’t be resolved for years. The trial, if it comes to that, isn’t scheduled until the fall of 2016. The class-action certification could take months.

In the meantime, Broshuis hopes the suit will spur minor leaguers to think about forming a union.

Several LumberKings players have ideas to improve their working conditions: housing allowances, increased per diems, ensuring adequate sleep on road trips. But they have no union and no representation in the major-league union, even though the collective bargaining agreements between the MLB and its players regularly affect minor leaguers.

For instance, the most recent agreement, in 2012, reduced the overall pool of money for signing bonuses — a concession made by major leaguers to win benefits elsewhere — and the agreement signed in 2007 delayed minor-league free agency by an extra year. “Yet minor leaguers have no voice at the table,” Broshuis says.

The Major League Players’ Association refused to comment for this story. In an emailed statement, communications director Gregory Bouris said the MLBPA’s “general belief” is that “all workers, regardless of industry or profession, deserve the right to protect their interests by unionizing and/or pursuing statutory options that may be available to them through the court system.”

The biggest roadblock to unionization is the players’ reluctance to rock the boat for fear of risking their careers.

“The notion that these very young, inexperienced people were going to defy the owners when they had stars in their eyes about making it to the major leagues — it’s just not going to happen,” the late Marvin Miller told Slate in 2012. Miller, a former executive director of the big-league players’ union who negotiated baseball’s first collective bargaining agreement in 1968, said the fear of being blackballed had long deterred any organizing by minor leaguers.

By contrast, baseball’s minor-league peers in professional hockey have been unionized for nearly 50 years. In 1967, Mark Messier’s father, Doug, hired a lawyer and rallied his Portland Buckaroo teammates to fight for higher salaries and better health care. From there, the Professional Hockey Players’ Association was born and the union now represents 1,600 players in the American Hockey League, East Coast Hockey League and the Central Hockey League.

The difference in salary compared to their baseball counterparts is stark.

In the AHL, which is one step below the NHL, the minimum salary is $45,000, while the average is more than $80,000, according to the association’s executive director, Larry Landon. That’s roughly four to eight times the standard pay for a non-free-agent Triple-A baseball player. In the ECHL, roughly equivalent to baseball’s Double-A level, players receive $1,700 a month, which is closer to the salaries in baseball’s high minors — though still higher — except that all ECHL players have their housing and utilities covered.

Yet Major League Baseball generates more than twice the annual revenue of the National Hockey League.

“The faster the baseball players at the minor-league level can unionize, the better off they’re going to be,” Landon says. “Our guys are talking about this lawsuit, saying, ‘Why doesn’t Minor League Baseball unionize? Why don’t those players see what we have and take action?’ ”

LumberKing reliever Brooks says he wished there was a union in baseball’s minors but he doesn’t have the time or energy to devote to something like that.

“We’ve got 140 games and maybe an off-day or two a month, plus travel. There’s definitely things that need to change, but right now we need to do our job, which is to play baseball, which I think is a good enough opportunity.”

Daly, the former Jays’ minor leaguer who joined the lawsuit earlier this year, understands that mentality. “I never said anything when I was a player. If you get into anything like that, your job’s in jeopardy, your chance (at getting promoted) is in jeopardy.

“But truly, in your heart you feel that you’re basically not getting what you should given the amount of time and hours and effort that you’re putting into it from a true job perspective. It’s not fair.”

On mobile? Click here to read a PDF version of MLB's response to the lawsuit.

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